Henry Aubin: Sometimes playing nice doesn’t work

After several months of quiet, the student protesters are back this week — not nearly so many as before, but still.

They forced cancellation of a day’s classes at Vanier College (the first time the protest movement has hit an anglophone CEGEP). They also did so at four francophone CEGEPs in Montreal for periods ranging from one to three days. At Université du Québec à Montréal, boycotters caused some 30 classes to be closed during the week. Others discouraged students at Université de Montréal from attending dozens of classes on Thursday. The same day, as many as 3,000 students marched downtown.

We need to see these protests less as a post-script to last spring and summer’s demonstrations and more as a prelude to a fresh cycle of militancy featuring a more radical demand: zero tuition.

Most of this week’s demonstrators are associated with ASSÉ, formerly known as CLASSE, the largest and most radical of the student groups.

Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois sought students’ support in the September election by promising to do two things: first, to roll back the Liberals’ tuition increase while indexing tuition this year to the inflation rate and, second, to set later tuition levels after holding a summit between the government, students and university heads. Yet, as we saw this week, the PQ’s conciliatory stance has hardly satisfied the protest movement as a whole.

That’s not surprising.

When I was a student, I had a professor named Crane Brinton who fashioned a celebrated theory on how revolutions evolve. One of the historian’s numerous points was that a government’s concessions seldom appease a protest movement: The radicals see the slightest bending by authorities as weakness, and this only intensifies their appetite for further gains.

By this law of behaviour, it’s easy to see why ASSÉ’s appetite is becoming more voracious.

Let’s review all the friendly overtures that authorities have made toward the students since Marois axed the Liberals’ tuition hike on her first day in power:

Marois said students could keep the $39 million in supplementary financial aid that the Liberals had made available so as to make the tuition increase more affordable — this despite the fact the rationale for the aid, the tuition hike, was now extinct. The Quebec government is thus like a person who offers someone $20 in exchange for shovelling the sidewalk, and who then says, “Oh, don’t bother, here’s the $20.”

Marois in September named rookie MNA Pierre Duchesne as minister for post-secondary education. Last spring, as a Radio-Canada journalist, Duchesne had departed from reporters’ rule of impartiality by giving strikingly biased television reports in favour of the protesters. Now, as minister, he will be in charge of the summit. Forget any idea that the minister can serve as an honest broker between students and the university heads, who will seek higher tuition.

Duchesne indicated three weeks ago he was willing to go beyond the generosity of Marois’s electoral promise: Although the summit won’t be until February, he said that he already wanted to extend the tuition rollback not just during this academic year but also the next one — plus, he wanted to remove indexation. He thus squandered leverage at the summit for obtaining government thrift.

Duchesne cast doubt a week ago on the Quebec universities’ key argument for tuition increases. That is, that they are grossly underfinanced in comparison to other Canadian universities. The universities’ claim is manifestly solid. (The only question is by how much they are underfinanced.)

Also last week, Duchesne said he’s considering extending the right to strike to students, giving them equal footing with labour unions. This would legalize their ability to deprive other students to attend the courses they had paid for.

In addition to Marois naming moderate student leader-turned PQ MNA Léo Bureau-Blouin as her adviser, Education Minister Marie Malavoy has just recruited an ex-press attaché of Bureau-Blouin’s group, Matthieu Le Blanc, to be her own press attaché. Students must be seen as a special-interest group, just like any industry, and the line of demarcation between them and the government is getting hard to see.

Although Montreal police arrested 1,881 people for their street behaviour during the often unruly February-to-September protests, the two universities hardest hit by the boycott — UdeM and UQAM — have filed no disciplinary complaints against students for breaking school property or blocking other students’ access. And while Concordia University originally lodged complaints against 26 students for breaking school rules, including impeding access to class, it has since dropped all charges.

No one wants to ruffle students’ feathers.

You could see this complaisance again this week. Two laws were openly flouted when marchers didn’t tell police their route in advance and some of them wore masks, yet police made no arrests.

On Sunday, ASSÉ will hold a special meeting to discuss strategy for the new year. Count on it to intensify pressure on the Marois government to abolish tuition entirely.

The law most in evidence these days is Prof. Brinton’s Law: When authorities play nice, the radicals get more determined.

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